


houston, do you copy?

by ORiley42



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Apollo 11, Astronauts, Benthan Week Day 1: Soulmates, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Self-Esteem Issues, the moon!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 17:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20213476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ORiley42/pseuds/ORiley42
Summary: soulmates! in! spaaaaace!!





	houston, do you copy?

**Author's Note:**

> It was the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing and I watched this really great Apollo 11 documentary, so I can’t be blamed for wanting soulmates in SPACE.  
As you might imagine, I have taken MANY liberties with the historical record here. Like, so many (for example, this fic takes place in some mythical mixture of Mission Control in Houston and the firing room at the Kennedy Space Center, because I got geographically confused very early on in writing this…also there’s no sexism/racism/homophobia because I, for one, am tired of it all). I have done some research (AKA trawling Wikipedia) but I have also made stuff up to suit the romantic shenanigans of this story so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
Hope y’all enjoy & happy first day of Benthan Week! <3

“CAPCOM, checking in. We sound alright?” Luther adjusted the microphone a few millimeters to the right.

“I can hear you just fine, if that’s what you mean,” Commander Hunt replied from where he was sitting, hundreds of feet above the ground on top of the biggest rocket mankind ever created. “But you sound pretty rusty—I thought you were gonna lay off the cigarettes?”

Benji bit down a grin while Luther rolled his eyes heavenwards. “I’ll stop smoking when you stop doing damn fool things like shooting yourself into space.”

“Mister Stickell,” Hunley sighed, leaning over the computer behind them from his command post, “if it wouldn’t trouble you too much, do you think you could stick to your pre-flight checks, and leave belittling our chosen profession for later?”

“Sure, director,” Luther rumbled, “But I hope you’ve got a good chunk of time blocked out for this future belittling, because I’ve got a lot stored up.”

Benji wasn’t fast enough to stifle his laugh this time, earning him a sharp glare from his boss. He whipped on a frown and returned to work, but Luther gave him a friendly elbow-knock.

“Alright, Commander,” Luther cleared his throat and returned his attention to his workstation, “you know the drill. Let’s begin the final check of spacecraft systems.”

Commander Ethan Hunt. Leader of the Apollo 11 mission, the man destined to be the first of their species to set foot on the moon. Highly decorated, highly skilled, and charismatic to boot. Some of the more colorful papers had declared him a ‘dreamboat,’ and Benji privately agreed. Movie-star smile and hair to match, easy grace and a calm aura of control that could merit respect from 30,000 feet into the stratosphere. Benji had only ever seen the man from a distance, but he’d felt the pull of him, like gravity, but friendlier. Warmer. They’d made eye contact once, passing in the hallway, and Benji had thereafter promptly walked into a wall.

He tried not to think about that.

They still had almost two hours before liftoff, and the Apollo crew had been stuck in the pressurized cabin for longer than that. But the tension filling the air was electric with possibility, and no one minded ticking boxes when those boxes were what kept those billions of dollars’ worth of computers and steel and liquid hydrogen from going up in a ball of fire, and taking the lives of at three brave people with it.

“Oxygen flow normal, check,” Brandt, the module pilot, answered.

“Copy,” Luther said, as a dozen people around him made notes on their respective clipboards. “Fuel temperature?”

“Within acceptable parameters,” the lunar pilot and Ethan’s future co-moon-walker, Ilsa Faust, answered.

“Co—” the last syllable of Luther’s reply was lost in a cough, and he gestured for Benji to lean in and reply for him, “Copy.”

The fact that Red Team’s CAPCOM—the one and only person on the ground through which all capsule communications were run—occasionally suffered from tar-induced speechlessness was an irony lost on no one. However, Luther was a living legend of space travel who’d kept Mission Control running smoothly since Project Mercury, so there was no question that he’d be in the metaphorical driver’s seat when man first stepped on the moon. Assisting in the vocal elements of this role was an unofficial portion of Benji’s duties, and a large part of why a tech as lowly as him got such prime seating in the firing room.

“Clock sync with UTC, check,” Ethan’s voice crackled through the speakers.

A tingle shot up Benji’s spine. He straightened and looked around, because he swore he could smell something burning. Ozone.

“C—” Luther’s confirmation once again turned into a cough. He thwacked Benji’s arm and pointed to the microphone. Benji’s skin prickled with nerves and something else, but he bent over the arm of his chair to speak clearly into the mic, “Copy.”

His heart stopped. As in, it genuinely stopped—a whole second of cardiac nada. Which was par for the course when a person connected with their soulmate, but that didn’t stop it from being a hell of a shock to the poor sucker experiencing it.

Benji couldn’t breathe. This was less from the physiological effects of his ongoing soul-bonding, and more from the fact that he was in the process of realizing that his soulmate was debatably the most famous man in America, while Benji got stage fright ringing up at the grocery store. Also, from the fact that said soulmate/super-star was parked atop what amounted to the largest bomb on Earth, and that he was about to flee the planet. The planet that Benji was currently on. They were, in short order, not going to be sharing the same _planet_—this was a conundrum that not a single other pair of recent soul-bonds had faced in the entirety of human history.

“Dunn?” Luther covered his mic and leaned over to where Benji was trying and failing to ride out the shock of his entire world turning upside down, “Jesus, are you having a stroke or something?”

“No, no…it’s just—” Benji could barely find the air to speak, but he had to say it: “The potential love of my life is about to blast out of the earth’s atmosphere and I’m having a little trouble coping.”

Luther blinked. Luther frowned. Then, in a strangely comforting moment of anti-climax, he patted Benji’s arm and said, “Oh, kiddo.”

Medical, a slightly paunchy man with thinning blonde hair, two rows down and half a dozen chairs to their right, flicked his mic on and reported, “Hunt’s heartrate just, well, it looked like it was _gone_ for a moment and now it’s spiked like hell. Is he doin’ alright up there?”

Luther turned back to his station with one last glance at Benji. He relayed the question to the capsule as a few nervous glances buzzed around the room. Ethan was famous for his ultra-steady BPM—there’d been a pool going about whether it would even top 80 at take-off.

“Everything’s fine,” Ethan replied, voice resolute, “just a, uh, personal surprise.”

“…._oh_.” Medical looked at his instruments again, then over at Luther with huge eyes. Luther caught the look and slashed a hand across his throat. Medical gulped, but shut up.

It was too late, however, because there were approximately four hundred people monitoring the minutia of this world-changing mission, and the signs of a soul-meeting were just too well-known. The whispers started spreading across the room like a gossipy virus.

Hunley was glaring down at them all, aware that something was awry and also aware that no one seemed to want to tell him about it. Before he could go nuclear, Luther rolled back in his chair and gestured with two firm, no-nonsense fingers for Hunley to lean over and listen.

The only words of the followed hushed conversation that Benji picked up on were, “holy shit,” and “_him_?!” He chose not to take the latter personally, since “_me_?!” had admittedly been his first thought when the situation began.

“Hey, Houston?” Ethan’s voice crackled over the comm and Benji’s stomach took a record-breaking dive. His head was spinning. He was dizzy. He was _nauseous_.

“Yeah, Hunt, we read you,” Luther said, unruffled. Benji deeply envied his unruffled-state and wondered if he could bargin with him for it. Ten bucks, a half-dead red pen, and an old pack of salt & vinegar chips for your calm demeanor, whataya say?

“Since we’ve got a minute,” Ethan said, and no one (not a single one of the hundreds of people listening) bought his casual tone for a second, “would you mind if you put…_him_ on the line?”

“Yes, we mind,” Hunley said over the banister, “This is a multi-million dollar expedition to redefine human history, not a fancy set-up for you to share love poetry.”

“Hey, Hunley?” Luther said.

“What?”

Luther threw a pencil with excellent aim, the rubber eraser smacking right between Hunley’s eyes. “Shut up. And you—” Luther pointed firmly at Benji, “talk away.”

Benji’s mouth was dry and he was pretty sure he’d just forgotten the entirety of the English language except, inexplicably, all the lyrics to _Bye Bye Birdie_. God, he really should have paid more attention to that old _Mate for Life_ soap he used to watch with Nana after school.

“Hi,” he croaked. He coughed, then tried it again, aiming for less-frog-like and mostly just sounding scared, “Hello.”

“Hi,” Ethan replied, like this was the easiest thing in the world. And maybe it was, after all, he only had two other astronauts to reckon with, while Benji was fielding stares ranging from astonished to infuriated to jealous from a football-stadium’s worth of people.

This wasn’t the first long-distance soul-meeting, of course. Since the first days of written language, humans had been connecting in unexpected ways. With each new communications technology, the question arose again: can souls find their way to each other through this new medium? Telegraphs, telephones, talking through tin-cans-and-string, sign language, even sky writing—the trick wasn’t how, it was just that it be direct. You couldn’t connect with your soulmate through a general-audience television show, for example, (though a stroll through your local bookstore’s romance aisle will show this and many more implausible soul-meeting-methods), because each person had to be speaking directly to the other. You could, for example, stumble onto your soulmate when calling into a nationally-broadcast self-help radio program and have half a million people hear you gasp your way through the experience. Benji had read about that particular story in the paper and winced, hoping that if (when, he counselled himself, surely _when_) he met his soulmate, it would be a small and personal experience. Maybe they’d both be waiting in line at the bank, or end up sitting next to each other in a movie theater, or bump into each other taking a walk in the park. Something nice and mundane.

He really had not considered the possibility that he would connect with his one and only in the middle of a nationally televised spectacle, being observed from around the world by scientists on multiple continents.

“Do you think I could get your name?” Ethan asked, and it took Benji several moments too long to process the words, and even longer to remember the answer. Who the hell was he, besides terrified?

“Benji. Benjamin Dunn.” Saying it out loud felt strange and foreign.

“It’s nice to meet you, Benji.” Benji could hear Ethan’s smile as he tried the name out. He closed his eyes, and he could almost keep himself calm enough to return it. “Though the circumstances are, uh, less than ideal.”

A ripple of uneasy laughter trickled through the room. Benji’s eyes flew back open because it was no use pretending that he was alone.

“So, what do you do here, Benji?” Ethan asked, gamely attempting to get Benji to talk, and stop doing an impression of a very quiet, very nervous lump on a log.

Work. Alright, c’mon Benji, old man, you can talk about work.

“I do…I did, I mean, I mainly work with computers. Programming, er, all that—kind of a jack of all trades, really, help out where I can, but I did a bit with the specs for the lunar module’s landing computer, so, um...yes. That.”

He was just a tech. Just someone to fiddle about with circuits and blocks and memory banks, someone to call when something beeped in a way it wasn’t supposed to. He was the beep-man, that was all.

God, and now his soulmate was counting on those very computers he’d worked on to guide him safely out of the atmosphere and all the way to the damned moon, to the surface, then back up and all the way home to Earth! What if Benji had mucked it up, crossed a wire, fused a circuit? Christ, what if we never even get to meet in person because—because… Ethan could _die_ before I ever see his face, Benji realized, and he really did almost throw up, right there in front of God and Luther and half the scientists in America.

He couldn’t do this. Not now, not like this.

He shook his head, trying to silently tell Luther that if this went on for a second longer, he’d descend into a panic attack to put all other panic attacks to shame.

The stern lines of Luther’s face were seared with disappointment, but that only cemented Benji’s decision. Disappointment was surely all that lay in front of him, in front of Ethan, with his kind voice and record-breaking 100-meter dash time and ensured legacy in the history books and all the other things Benji could never hope to match him in. Might as well let the parade of let-downs begin.

Luther sighed, and took mercy. “Sorry to break up this tender moment, Commander Hunt, but that final checklist won’t finish itself. We’ve gotta shake it if we’re gonna have liftoff on time, and you know how those tourists and TV hounds are chomping at the bit to catch sight of you all going up in smoke.”

The radio crackled with a pregnant pause. Then: “It wouldn’t do to keep them waiting,” Ethan agreed, and the confused regret in his voice almost broke Benji’s heart.

“Faust here,” Ilsa took over from the capsule, “Let’s talk weather—still blue skies down there?” There was a trace of pity in her voice, and Benji thought that Ethan would hate that. Benji was personally fine with a spot of pity, because he was feeling pretty damned pitiable. But Ethan was different, he— Benji shook his head. What the hell did he know about what Ethan was feeling?

The checklist proceeded without a hitch. Benji sat in silence, largely useless now that he didn’t dare act as Luther’s stand-in voice. He watched and waited and tried not to notice the eyes that periodically flicked back to inspect him.

After an agonizing wait, the manual countdown began. The building excitement was going critical, you could almost smell it in the air.

At three minutes and twenty seconds, the countdown became automatic. Unstoppable.

“That’s it for our in-flight entertainment,” Luther quipped, leaning back in his chair, “so you folks just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

With 8.9 seconds left on the countdown, ignition began. White steam crept up from the first engine, and the other four followed suit a moment later with a tremendous roar. It was terrible and wonderful to see: this unthinkable behemoth, screaming to leave the surface, standing almost still like it was waiting to be engulfed in flame. But then it moved—slowly, ponderously upward, fighting for every inch to drag its massive tonnage from the grip of gravity.

It was out of their hands, now.

From behind Benji, a voice cut in, “The vehicle has cleared the pad.”

The room released a collective sigh of relief, cheers of celebration quick on its heels. For a moment, Benji felt the full force of their elation, but it wasn’t alone for long, grief and embarrassment snarling up beside it.

The sensation was quite vivid. He was being split it two, perfectly down the middle, with years of work crying out in joy at this success—this incredible success! They were on their way to the _moon_!—on one side, and his newfound connection aching, serrated edges dug deep in his heart and tearing at the flesh of his soul. A soul he hadn’t been particularly sure was real as recently as that morning, but god in heaven was it real, because its other half was clearing the troposphere at 20,000 kph and he could _feel_ it.

“Shutdown of first-stage engines, confirm,”

“Confirm,” Luther relayed.

Minutes ticked by. Benji felt heat from his feet to his knees, and he knew he was imagining it, the fire and pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere pressing against the capsule, whispering for it to return to the surface. Still, he tried to breathe even and deep, like he was inhaling recycled oxygen, the weight of infuriated gravity shoving his suited back into his seat.

“Orbit achieved.”

“Copy,” Luther smiled, “Congratulations. You cleared the first hundred kilometers alright, just another 380,000 to go.”

Laughter echoed through the radio and around the room. “So.” Benji startled when he realized Luther was talking to him. “They’re gonna circle the entire damn planet before they start heading for the main attraction. We’ve got a minute,” Luther said, pointedly.

Benji tried to drum up his courage and found it rather lacking. Still, fewer people were paying attention, maybe he could do this. He had to try.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Stickell,” Hunley boomed, making Benji nearly fall out of his chair, and oh hell—he was actually descending, coming around the long way, squeezing past a row of cringing workers to glare at Benji and Luther at close range. “I understand these are extenuating circumstances. I was willing to allow it to go this far—but no further.”

Luther’s eyes widened with understanding Benji didn’t share. “Don’t do this—” Luther tried, but Hunley cut him off with a sharp gesture.

“No. It’s clear what must be done, and you should know that. I mean, do you really think he can be impartial, now?” Hunley jerked a thumb at Benji, who rankled at being spoken about as if he weren’t sitting right there.

“With all due respect, none of us are impartial, _sir_.” Luther managed to make that honorific sound like a scandalizing insult. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to participate in making history, and all of our hearts and minds are up there with those brave people.”

“Be that as it may,” Hunley bit out, “our _souls_ are not. And the protocols are clear. This operation falls under the highest authority, it’s a matter of national security. Hell, planetary security. And in these matters, we keep emotional nonsense like soulmates as far away as possible.

“Mr. Dunn,” Hunley turned to Benji, who was too numb with dawning realization to react to his cold stare, “You are—temporarily, and with pay—relieved of duty.”

A rumble of nearby whispers sounded, aghast. Jack—a good guy, Benji’d worked under him with the LM computer project—even stood up to protest, “You can’t do that, it’s not fair. He’s worked as hard as the rest of us and he deserves—”

“Fair isn’t my concern, Mr. Harmon,” Hunley snapped, “Nor is who deserves what. And unless you really want to test that, I suggest you sit your ass down.”

“Alright,” Benji said, before the situation could escalate further. “That’s…alright. I’ll just…” He rose slowly to his feet, not quite sure his legs were on board with the plan.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Hunley said with what he presumably thought was a gracious nod. It was not gracious, and Benji wished he had a cup of lukewarm coffee to ‘accidentally’ dump on the man’s trousers. Since he didn’t, he just settled for ignoring him and turning around to leave with whatever dignity he had left.

As Benji slunk away, he heard Luther lay into Hunley, “You should keep in mind that I’ll be filing an official complaint over this. And also, that I’m not above slashing a man’s tires when he offends me, Mr. Midlife-Crisis Cadillac Eldorado.”

Benji almost smiled at that. At least he still had friends, no matter what else. And his family too—oh god, his family. How was he going to explain this to Nana?

As it turned out, Nana didn’t need an explanation. She just said, “Well, if they don’t appreciate all your hard work, then screw the lot of them!” very loudly whilst on the front porch, scandalizing a passing couple. His sister, Maggie, expressed similar feelings, with an added dash of cussing (though not on the front porch, thankfully).

Without a job to attend, he had little reason to leave the house, so he spent the following days cleaning the place from top to bottom. The taps shone, the floors gleamed, and he even tried to learn how to cook—this last ended badly, especially since Maggie tried to teach him, and she was the only person in the world more hopeless at the craft than he. Nana ended up rescuing that particular dinner with an on-the-fly stew, and everyone was grateful.

And through every second of it, Benji ached.

Naturally, it burned him to have been cut out of the official loop at that last, critical moment, after all the hours of grudging labor and frustration and dead-ends and miraculous fixes. But worse, it felt like dying to have lost his one, slender connection to Ethan.

The afternoon of the moon landing, Benji was trying to nap the hours away. He was restless and exhausted, face mashed into his pillow and a blanket pulled over his head like that could stop the world getting in. It did not, in fact, stop the world getting in. Particularly, it had zero effectiveness in combating his over-excited sister when she burst into the room shouting, “Get up! Benji, get up, _get up_!”

“Whazzat?” he mumbled as she ripped the comforter away and tried to bodily pull him out of bed.

“There’s a man on the phone from NASA, he says he has to talk to you _right now_!”

Benji was at least half-awake at the word NASA. Maggie ditched him by the door to dash down the hall, grabbing the phone and stretching its cord to the limit, handing it off to Benji like this was a high-stakes relay race.

“Hello?” he muttered into the receiver.

“Dunn? We’ve got a problem.”

“Jack?” Benji knuckled at his eyes, bewildered and then apprehensive, “What, what is it?”

“I’m probably not supposed to be talking to you, but the fact of the matter is, no one knows the LGC better than you.”

“Huh? That’s not, I mean, surely there’s—”

“Shut up,” Jack shouted down the line, making Benji wince and pull the phone from his ear, “There’s no time for modesty. We started the descent burn a few minutes ago, everything looked fine until we hit about 6,000 feet and then the guidance computer started losing its mind. We’ve got 1201 and 1202 program alarms going off and we can’t figure out what’s causing them, and if we can’t fix this then we’ll have to pull the plug.”

The silence rang heavy, just Jack’s breath and Benji trying to remember how to breathe.

“Pull the—you mean cancel the landing?”

“Yes, so please, _advise_.”

Of course, they’d have to cancel if there was danger. The safety of the astronauts had to come first. Except the only thing that would be worse for Ethan than dying in the vacuum of space would be surviving it, but not getting to set foot on the moon.

“1201 and 1202….” Benji muttered to himself, “but those wouldn’t…unless…”

“Listen, Dunn, if you don’t know, just—”

“I’ve got it!” Benji shouted, ignoring Jack entirely as the computer’s schematics rolled through his mind’s eye, tracing over the circuits and landing on the rendezvous radar switch. “Oh, of course. Don’t you see?” Benji took a step away and the phone cord pulled taught, dragging him backwards. “It’s not an alarm, I mean it _is_, but it’s not what you think. There’s too much data to process! This is just the computer’s way of telling us, ‘hey guys, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, I’ve got to drop a couple little calculations to deal with the really massive and important ones, just thought you ought to know.’” Benji finished the explanation with a gasp of much-needed air.

“Executive overflow,” Jack concluded, a glimmer of hope in his voice.

“Yes, exactly!” Benji cried, throwing his hands in the air and almost dropping the phone.

“The computer’s not warning us to abort, it’s taking care of the problem.”

“Yes! It can handle it, you just have to give it a chance.”

“Alright, okay—hey, Bales! Listen, it’s not—” Jack hung up. The dial tone buzzed in Benji’s ear.

He slowly set the phone back in the cradle. First, he thought: God, I hope I’m right. Ethan’s life is depending on it, and Ilsa and Will’s too—they’ve both got families, kids even. Second, he thought: would it really have killed him to say thanks?

Maggie, who’d naturally been listening in to the whole thing, leapt forward. “Did you just save the moon landing?” she asked, almost vibrating with excitement.

“That’s—that’s an exaggeration,” he tried to wave her off.

“And that’s not a no!” she cheered, bouncing towards the couch. “Hey, Nana! Benji’s a hero!”

“Oh, yes, dear, I know that,” Nana agreed, barely glancing up from her knitting.

Benji felt like he could run a mile, and also like he might collapse right there in the kitchen. He _had_ saved the moon landing, he really had, and yet… Here he was. Still at home, still not really a part of things. He hadn’t gotten to hear Ethan’s voice, how it would’ve been tight and controlled, patience fraying but not snapping because he couldn’t let that happen. He hadn’t gotten to hear the relief when he was allowed to go ahead, when he knew that he’d get to land. He wouldn’t get to hear Ethan’s voice when they finally touched down on the moon’s surface—if they touched down on the moon’s surface, that is. They weren’t out of the woods yet.

Benji collapsed on the couch in front of the television, with its continuous coverage of all things moon-related. The TV hookup to show images of the moon landing wouldn’t be configured until much closer to the event, but if something went wrong before then, this was his only avenue of information.

So, Benji sat there, and waited.

“You’ll hear him again, soon enough, on the television at least,” his sister tried to console him, reading his unhappy thoughts from his expression.

“Yeah,” he agreed, trying to appear a little more lifelike, for his family’s sake. But the problem was that to hear Ethan through the television set, speaking to the whole world and not to him, might be worse than not hearing him at all. Which was probably terrible and selfish of him, but it was the truth, and he didn’t need to add self-deception to his list of problems.

His sister and Nana alternately joined him and left and returned again over the next few hours, finally settling in for the long haul as the TV announced that they’d have pictures, any minute, of the surface of the moon. Benji very nearly didn’t care about the moon, only about one particular person on it—but he was glad to find there was still a small, muted part of his scientific heart pumping with excitement at the thrill of it all. After all, it was the _moon_! He did his best to hold onto that feeling.

The stale graphics and talking heads the news had been circulating for hours faded away, replaced by a storm of black and white static. The image cleared, cloudy but legible: the ladder of the landing module, descending towards a tilted white surface, with a blurry figure aboard.

“Okay, Ethan, we can see you coming down the ladder now,” the announcer’s voice hissed and crackled.

And there he was. Not that anyone, including Benji, could recognize Ethan through the marshmallow-fluff of the spacesuit, the opaque visor tinged with its golden sunshield merely a dark blob on the television screen.

Another voice answered the first and Benji realized with a jolt that it was Ethan, that was _Ethan’s voice_, speaking to them all from hundreds of millions of miles away.

His booted foot descended slowly, so slowly down the ladder, the lack of gravity and abundance of gear making him move like an uncoordinated toddler taking his first trip out of his mother’s arms to cross the living room.

He was testing the bottom of the ladder, checking to be sure he could move from it to the surface and back, and he was so cheerful and professional and _beautiful_.

He kept up a near constant dialogue with Houston, and Benji could almost feel the other, millions of people around the globe hanging on Ethan’s every word alongside him.

“The surface appears to be, uh, very, very fine-grained as you get close to it, almost like a powder…”

Benji had never been so thrilled to hear someone describing shadows and dust. He’d been wrong, before, thinking it would be difficult to share Ethan with the world. It was simple, and right, because this moment belonged to everyone.

“Look, that’s Benji’s soulmate, Nana!” Maggie announced loudly, trying to catch their very hard-of-hearing grandmother’s attention.

“Ooh, that’s nice dear,” Nana smiled owlishly down at where her granddaughter sat cross-legged in front of the television, like they had when she and Benji were children. “Is he handsome?”

“Very,” Maggie confirmed.

“Mmm, good. Make sure to check his teeth.”

“Huh?” Maggie looked to Benji. Benji pursed his lips and offered, “She seems to think we’re talking about a horse?”

“Got to check the teeth before you buy, always remember that.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely about a horse,” Maggie agreed, patting Nana’s knee. “Well, her eyes are sharper than her ears, so she’ll see that he’s not a horse when she meets him.”

Benji hmmed, non-committal.

Maggie narrowed her eyes and punched his shin. “What are you hmming about? Don’t think you won’t be bringing your handsome spaceman around for tea the _second_ he’s back on the planet.”

“He’s not mine,” Benji said softly.

“Uh…yeah, he is, you dunce.” Maggie hit him again, but with more fondness this time.

“We’ve never….I’ve never even seen him. Not for real.”

“So?” Maggie packed truly record-breaking levels of disbelief into her raised eyebrow.

“So…” Benji might as well say it out loud, in front of a test audience, if you will. See how real it seemed in the light of day. “So, what if he comes back and meets me and…doesn’t like me? Doesn’t want to be with me? What if, after seeing our silly little marble of a planet from the moon, I’m just…nothing? I’m not special.”

Maggie looked like she wanted to hit him again, perhaps in the face this time, and also like she just might burst into tears. Benji was grateful when she split the difference by grabbing a cushion off the couch and beaning him in the head with it, shouting, “Benjamin Dunn, you absolute _idiot_. Of course, he’ll like you, of course, he’ll want to be with you, and _of course_! You!” she smacked him with the cushion again, punctuating each word, “Are! Special!”

“Now, now, stop that!” Nana broke in, throwing a ball of yarn between the two. “Benny is very special!” she added at high volume, having caught at least a thread of the conversation, “He is our special boy, isn’t he? He put that ship up in space, he works for NASA!”

“He does,” Maggie agreed, “and so does your future-son-in-law.”

“Son-in-law?” Nana said with great delight, “are you getting married, my dear?”

“What? No!”

Benji grinned as Maggie tried with increasing frustration to fend off Nana’s inquiries as to who this man was and why she hadn’t heard of him before.

“But when—oh, hush!” Nana quieted herself and Maggie all at once as the atmosphere shifted, and the television image fizzled to accommodate a grainy, type-written caption: “Hunt on moon.”

And then Ethan’s voice—“Here goes nothing,” and they watched with bated breath as one blurry white boot descended towards the dusty surface. It touched down. Benji’s heart stopped for the second time that week.

A lovely, full silence, waiting to be filled with cheers.

Ethan’s voice again, speaking words that would never be forgotten: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Applause and shouts of joy rang out, all across the country and the world. They could hear the neighbors, kids and adults alike shouting their heads off because we’re on the moon, did you hear us, _we’re on the moon_!

Nana waved her half-finished knitting above her head like a flag and Maggie had her face barely six inches from the TV screen so she didn’t miss a detail, and Benji had both hands over his mouth so he couldn’t do something foolish like start crying.

They watched, rapt, as the moonwalk continued. The first steps, moving away from the ladder, testing the ground. “Live voice of Astronaut Hunt from the surface of the moon,” the television caption exclaimed breathlessly, and the sense of marvel didn’t cease, no matter how little the picture changed—Ethan standing, Ethan walking slowly, dragging along the line of his tether, Ethan adjusting the camera. Astronaut Ilsa Faust followed Ethan about ten minutes later, and the announcer said grandly, “There are now two human beings, on the moon.” Maggie gave a particularly spirited whoop as the words, “Faust on moon,” appeared (Benji suspected she had a minor crush on the lovely astronaut, and he hadn’t yet had the heart to tell her that Ilsa was very much married).

“How’s it feel?” Maggie asked, half turning towards him. “Seeing him up there?”

Benji shook his head, shoulders hunching forward as if to be closer to the image on the set, to him. “I am so proud, I don’t know how to contain it. And that’s not even fair, is it, because him and me—that should feel small, shouldn’t it? This whole soulmate business…I mean, I’m just one person. We’re just two people, and this is about the whole human race. It’s about our planet, our solar system, our universe. But I feel…I can feel him. I know that’s stupid,” Benji shoved a hand across his eyes, which were watering traitorously, “I mean, our connection’s not even cemented and he’s literally thousands of miles away, but I swear I can feel what he’s feeling right now.”

Maggie finally tore her eyes away from the TV, and Benji felt better when he saw her damp cheeks, knowing he wasn’t alone. “I don’t think it’s stupid,” she said, “I think it’s beautiful. And isn’t that the point? The largeness and the smallness of everything. This incredible thing we did, all to prove that we’re just a little blue dot in the hugeness of space. Two tiny, insignificant people sharing the most indescribable, vital experience we know in the universe. A perfect microcosm of existence.”

“That is so deep,” Benji nodded gravely, “Did you take a philosophy class at that college of yours? Because you know that will rot your brains.”

Maggie scoffed, the stifling enormity of the moment going up like a popped balloon. They both snickered, and Maggie flipped him the bird when she was sure Nana wasn’t looking.

“But seriously…” Benji held out an appeasing hand, “you’re absolutely right. And a genius.”

“Obviously,” Maggie flipped her hair dramatically over her shoulder before taking his hand and joining him on the couch, “It runs in the family.”

Benji walked back into Mission Control three days later, a spring added to each step he took back inside, into the heart of it all.

“Luther!” Benji grinned and shook his hand. “I don’t know how you did this, but I owe you huge.”

“You do,” Luther agreed, “but you’re not the only one. Sloane, the director of Blue Team, has a kid who wanted to do math at MIT; I put in a good word with some old friends of mine. Unrelatedly, she realized it was awfully silly to deny you a harmless little seat during the return.”

“Unrelatedly,” Benji nodded, faux serious.

“It also pissed Hunley off to no end, which is always a bonus,” Luther added as they headed into the firing room.

“Alright, folks,” Sloane announced from her perch in the aerie, “Let’s bring our people home.”

Luther, Benji, and a number of members of the other teams gathered at the back of the room, letting the current squad do their jobs.

They tracked the small craft, having shed the moon-landing _Eagle_, now just the command module _Columbia_, barreling at unimaginable speeds back to Earth. A truly ridiculous thing, all of this, to stuff three human beings in a metal cone and then drop them into the atmosphere, where a resin heat shield was the only thing standing between them and dying in a melted hunk of steel alloy and aluminum.

Benji listened intently to the back and forth of CAPCOM and _Columbia_, Brandt speaking the most as he prepared to steer—as much as anyone could steer when hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour—the module into the landing zone in the Pacific.

Ethan only came on the radio a few times, but Benji treasured every brisk “copy” and “roger.”

As they neared the finish line, the sound cut out abruptly and Benji jumped.

“Communications blackout,” Luther said, calm and steady before Benji could descend into hysterics, “expected during reentry.”

“How long?” Benji asked as Luther cracked his knuckles. A nervous tic. 

“Under twenty seconds.”

“Unless something goes wrong.”

“That’s the spirit,” Luther deadpanned.

“Sorry.” Benji gave up trying not to bite his nails, chewing on his thumb to keep from doing something more disruptive, like screaming or dashing from the room or running up to JFK’s memorial and demanding to know why, exactly, it was so goddamned important to chuck a bunch of human beings onto the moon. Who cared about the moon, when there were people on Earth? People who needed those people you’d just hurled so carelessly into the cold, empty nothingness of space.

Benji clutched the plastic armrest of his chair, feeling abruptly cold and heavy—like gravity was reasserting its dominance. Like the vast ocean was swallowing him whole.

A second later, CAPCOM grinned and announced, “Splashdown. Columbia has been located, retrieval is in progress.”

The room filled with cheers, almost equal to those of liftoff and the landing, but with an unstable touch of melancholy and relief. They’d brought their brave travelers home safely, thank god, it was all over—it was all over.

The TV cameras couldn’t capture the full spectacle, but Benji could imagine it. Red and white striped parachutes, bright against the blue sky, the cold hiss of scalding metal against the endless sea. Three tiny humans in a little tin can, just returned from one uninhabitable expanse only to be dropped, drowning in another. Well, not drowning, not if everything was going to plan. And as far as the radio chatter went, the plan seemed miraculously in place—the buoyancy of the capsule acting as expected, the helicopters closing in without issue to snatch up the weary travelers.

But he knew he wouldn’t feel alright, wouldn’t feel whole, until he saw him.

He had to wait, however. Wait through the water retrieval, the flight home, the press junket, the debrief, and then—

18 days. The astronauts would be quarantined for 18 days in the lunar receiving laboratory, to be monitored and isolated until the lab coats could be sure that they hadn’t picked up any stray space germs or other extra-terrestrial maladies. Benji vaguely remembered hearing that in one briefing or another, but he had put it from his mind since it didn’t involve computers and so had seemed irrelevant at the time. It was now the single most relevant fact in existence.

He nervously prowled the edge of the containment facility, close enough to see the astronaut’s family members lining up outside, far enough away that the occupants shouldn’t be able to spot him. Not that Ethan would recognize him anyway, Benji thought dully.

The containment room looked like a souped-up Airstream trailer. Someone with a sense of humor had hung a sign outside the welded doors saying, “Please don’t feed the animals.” A large glass window provided the only public view in and out, with a hatch in the back for the doctors to observe and collect samples through.

Will’s wife, Natasha, had their two kids in tow, both sporting spectacularly red heads of hair, like their mother. Jane was walking alongside her, hand laid casually on the bump of her stomach. She and Ilsa were expecting their first child in a matter of weeks.

Benji watched Jane pick up one of the bright orange telephones and exchange greetings with her wife, who pressed a hand to the glass. Jane’s fingers were a mirror of Ilsa’s on the other side, and Benji couldn’t stand the tender familiarity. The love.

He turned on his heel to leave and almost collided with Luther’s broad chest, which was somehow radiating disapproval.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Uh, away from here?” Benji tried, to no avail.

“I’d pick you up and carry you over there myself, but that might create the impression that you don’t want to see him,” Luther said archly.

“Of course, I want to see him,” Benji hissed. “Of fucking course I do! It’s like I’m on fire and I’m numb all at once and it’s killing me, but I can’t, okay? I can’t just—just wander up to the most famous man in America, knock on the glass, and say congratulations, you’re stuck with me for the rest of your life.”

“Seriously? You don’t think he’ll be thrilled to meet the person he was built to love?” Luther looked like he wanted to laugh, and also like he wanted to slap Benji upside the head. Benji was getting a little tired of seeing that particular expression on his friends’ and family’s faces. “There’s something about this soulmate business that you’re really not getting.”

“But that’s the thing! Soulmates, it’s all so—” Benji grappled for the right words, “there’s no _choice_.”

“Of course, there is,” Luther scoffed, “You’ve got all the choice in the world—that’s why you’re standing here, acting like a dick, instead of being a man and talking to Ethan.”

“Thanks,” Benji grumbled, “your support is always appreciated.”

“I’m actually not here to knock some sense into you—if I’d known that was the job, I’d have brought a bat—but to warn you. The tabloids have got ahold of the story. Soulmates in space, the headlines will be out in the evening edition.”

“Oh, Christ.” Benji hung his head.

“Yeah, I know. HQ’s put a hush order on the whole thing, wants the mission to be about sticking it to the Russians and achieving great scientific bounds or whatever—in that order, I quote. But, you know how soulmates sell papers. And you’ve gotta admit, this was one hell of a meetcute.”

“‘Hell’ is an accurate descriptor, yes,” Benji huffed. “But the press vultures descending is just another reason for me to get out of here.”

“Listen, Benji,” Luther clapped a hand to one of Benji’s shoulders, then the other, holding him a grip that was currently loose but threatened to tighten. “I consider you a friend, I do. But seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? He’s your goddamn soulmate. You should be jumping at the bit to see him.”

“I do want to see him. I want it to be him and me—I want us to be alone.” Now that Benji was putting it into words, it was pouring out of him. “And I want it to be in person, properly. No radio, no glass between us. And this isn’t me being picky or shy or some bullshit, it’s about needing one solitary moment to look in his eyes and find out if this is actually _real_.”

“Well.” Luther released him and crossed his arms. “That clears things up. And it’s a tall order, but I think I can help make about two-thirds of it happen.”

“Huh?”

“Meet me at Loading Dock C tonight, half past nine. And dress nice—your soulmate’s gonna see you for the first time, after all.”

Luther walked away and Benji gaped after him. He had no clue what had just happened. He checked his watch and decided, what the hell, before heading home to try and spruce himself up before tonight’s miraculous meeting.

At 9:27, Benji was cooling his heels at Loading Dock C. He almost bolted like a startled hare when Luther threw open a service door and gestured impatiently for him to follow.

Benji did, nearly plowing into an elderly man with a security guard’s uniform.

“Thanks again, Gary,” Luther called back to him as he towed Benji forward.

“No problem, Mr. S!” Gary replied with a merry doff of his cap.

“Someone else’s kid need to get sweet-talked onto MIT’s acceptance list?” Benji asked Luther under his breath.

“Naw. Gary and I play cards every Saturday night, and let’s just say his poker face could use some work. This clears his debt—not that I really intended to sweep his retirement fund out from under him, but still.”

Benji shook his head, equally amused and impressed. “How is it that everyone in this place owes you a favor?”

Luther shot him a look, “You tell me, considering that now you owe me two.”

“Fair point.”

They rounded a corner of the building’s interminable maze to find themselves at the back end of the lunar receiving laboratory. It hummed and glowed with the minimum energy of the nighttime shift; Benji spotted one shadow moving behind the milky glass.

Luther opened the “Secure—Do Not Enter Without Authorization” door without hesitation. Benji followed with enough hesitation for both of them.

“Benji,” Luther gestured from him to a short, blonde woman in slacks and a white coat, “This is Doctor June Burnham.”

“Hello,” Benji said, automatically holding out a hand to shake.

“Hi,” she said, ignoring the offered hand and instead giving him a once over. “Alright, let’s get going. You’ll have to wear these over your shoes,” Dr. Burnham handed him a pair of gauze booties, “and while you’re inside, minimal touching. Ten minutes only, to minimize potential exposure, though we’re not worried. No sign of any extra-terrestrial organisms, large or small, which is why we’re allowing limited person-to-person interaction. But, once you’re out, you’ll have to go through some decon procedures. Nothing invasive, but you’ll probably smell like chlorine for a couple of days.”

“I—excuse me, what’s happening here?” Benji leaned away from the doctor, who was brandishing a clipboard with more vigor than he thought strictly advisable.

Dr. Burnham gifted him with an unimpressed look as Luther stepped in to explain, “What do you think? You’re going to get your minute alone with your spaceman.”

“Oh.” Benji clutched the flimsy booties to his chest for a moment before leaping into action, almost falling on his ass in the process. He was still terrified, of course, but it was overwhelmed by need—the need to see, to touch. Ethan was so close, Benji could almost taste him. Which was actually pretty weird, but he rolled with it.

“Alright,” the doctor said, twirling a pen like a baton and dragging open a heavy door, revealing a steel antechamber, “In you go.”

Benji stepped inside, reminding himself that he’d never been claustrophobic before, and now was not the time to start. The hatch slammed shut behind him. He waited, rolling up on his toes and back onto his heels. The air shifted, and then with a shy click, the door in front of him leading to the containment chamber drifted open.

He pushed his way inside and didn’t take in a single fact about the room except that Ethan was in it. Ethan was standing there, in a soft black T-shirt and worn jeans, looking very tired, but also hopeful. He looked so beautiful, and so…material. He was _here_.

Benji’s forward momentum began to lose steam. Walk forward, he told himself firmly, just walk forward. That’s it, just move those feet like you’ve been doing for so many years.

“Um, hello,” he said. Not exactly a stunner as conversational openers went, but at least it was coherent.

“Hi.” Ethan smiled, and it was so goddamn incandescent that Benji didn’t know how anyone could look at it and not fall instantly in love.

“It—it’s me, Benji,” he added.

“I know,” Ethan said kindly.

“Right. Of course.” Benji didn’t know how he could feel so hideously awkward and so numb at the same time—it was like this was all happening to someone else, except that he was observing that someone else suffer at extremely close proximity.

Benji and Ethan spoke at the same time.

“I was—”

“Do you—”

“Please,” Ethan held up a hand before Benji could protest, “you first.”

“Oh, I just. I was going to ask if you were alright. Being cooped up in here.”

Ethan smiled again. Benji really would have to learn how to keep breathing when he did that, or this relationship wouldn’t get very far.

“I’m alright. I don’t really like captivity, but it’s positively roomy compared to the Eagle, so.” Ethan took a step forward and Benji flinched. He didn’t mean to, it was all just so much. Ethan spotted it easily and stopped where he was. His smile looked a little sadder. “I didn’t believe June when she said that you were coming. Didn’t think you’d actually be allowed in here.”

“Oh, well, I’m probably not, technically,” Benji pointed at the small glass observation window to his left, “Luther pulled some magic strings and got me in.”

“Of course, Luther,” Ethan laughed, “Jeez, and I already owed him for helping out when my Corvette’s alternator crapped out.”

“Wow, he really has everyone here under his thumb, huh,” Benji managed to smile back. It was an anemic thing, but at least it was there.

“Have you seen his list?” Ethan asked, quirking up an eyebrow.

“He has a _list?”_

“Of course, how else do you think he keeps track?”

Benji burst into laughter and Ethan quickly followed suit. The discomfort that had hung over the moment like a miasma of socially awkward gnats finally released them, and Benji had to move closer.

He stopped when he was only a few feet away from Ethan, close enough to see all the details of his face, the line of his throat, the veins on his hands. Just far enough away that he wasn’t sucked entirely into that tempting golden aura that threatened to swallow him whole.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he blurted out, fingers twisting instinctively together in an anxious tell.

“No, it’s fine, I understand—”

“No, it was cowardly.”

Ethan looked confused. “I don’t see how. I mean, I’d just shot myself into space, leaving you all alone, and then you were unfairly kicked out of Mission Control and it was all my fault. I completely understand if you were angry with me.”

“Mad at you? You think…?” Benji could barely speak. He was boggled. This conversation was so off the rails already, he had no clue where to even begin, except to correct one glaring error. “Ethan, I’m not mad at you at _all_. It wasn’t your fault that Hunley decided to be a jerk and a stickler—you could hardly have done anything from orbit!”

“You’re…you’re really not mad?” Ethan asked, and he looked so hopeful and also so much like a recently-kicked puppy that Benji almost lost it right then and there.

“Ethan, I am the opposite of angry. I am—I was so—Ethan, I was a terrible coward, I didn’t fight for you. I could’ve argued, could’ve pushed much harder to speak with you, not just during the mission but this last week of containment, but I was just too scared to talk to you. I thought…” Benji’s chin trembled, and he wasn’t sure he’d make it through this without tearing up. “I thought you might be…be disappointed. I me, in who I am.”

“Disappointed?” Ethan’s expression looked very much like that of an American tourist to whom a slightly drunk English pub resident was attempting to explain the finer points of cricket.

Saying it out loud would be terrible, Benji knew, but at least then the thoughts might stop torturing the inside of his skull. Maybe, just maybe, Ethan was the one who could finally put them to rest. “When I realized who you were, who we were to each other—it felt like some cruel joke the universe was playing on me. I’m, I’m the one who stays behind, the one at the desk, on the other end of the phone—I don’t go out in the field, I don’t smile for the cameras. And you! You were built to be beloved by a nation. And what right did I have to elbow my way into that? Jam myself into your fate, like an extra person shoving their way onto an already crowded tram.”

Understanding seemed to descend on Ethan in bits and pieces, the puzzle not a realized picture, but the shape coming into view. “Benji, you have every right. You’re not elbowing your way in anywhere, I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. There’s always been a place for you right next to me, and just having you here, even like this, it feels…it feels so right I have no idea how I lived before this moment.”

Benji’s throat was raw and tight, he couldn’t speak even if he wanted to.

“It wasn’t right,” Ethan added, “How we met, it wasn’t right. But we’re here now, just you and me. It’s okay, now.”

“But that’s the problem. Ethan, I don’t just feel _inadequate_,” Benji said, so quiet Ethan had to strain to hear him. “I feel…unworthy.”

Ethan’s weight shifted forward, till only meager inches separated them. He was close, too close and altogether not close enough.

“Benji, please look at me.” Benji did. Where else could he look? Ethan continued, as serious as Benji had ever heard him, “Benjamin Dunn, I walked on the moon and that was only the second most awe-inspiring thing to ever happen to me.”

The word ‘flabbergasted’ was technically sufficient to describe Benji’s reaction to that, but it failed to capture the depth, the bone-shaking change that came over him. The transformation of belief.

“But I’m...I’m no moon walk,” Benji protested weakly.

“You’re better,” Ethan insisted, and he moved and he was holding Benji’s hands in both of his—how had that happened? God, he was so warm, it was like friendly fire. No survivors. “I don’t have to wear a space suit to interact with you. I can hold you in my hands, skin to skin. I don’t have to leave you behind.”

“Please don’t,” Benji whispered, “Please don’t leave me behind again.”

“Never,” Ethan promised, “Now that I’ve finally got you, I’m never letting go.”

“Okay,” Benji said, and it came out strangled.

“I just have…one question,” Ethan said, and Benji’s blood ran cold.

“Right, yes, what is it?” he asked.

“Were you…did I…have I seen you before? Before today?”

“I…oh. God. Um.”

“Did you…” Ethan seemed to be searching for more delicate phrasing than whatever came immediately to mind, “have an unfortunate meeting of wall and face?

“Christy almighty,” Benji closed his eyes. “Yeah, that was me.”

Ethan didn’t laugh. It was very noble of him, Benji thought.

“I wanted to ask if you were alright,” he said instead, “It looked like there might have been some, um, damage.”

“I was perfectly alright, thank you very much,” Benji sniffed. “At least, I was before you went and looked at me with those beautiful dark eyes and threw my spatial coordination entirely out the window. You, you should be _careful_ with those things.”

“I’ll be more circumspect in the future. But it shouldn’t be a problem after all…” Ethan paused, urging Benji to lean in as he finished, “I only have eyes for you.”

“Oh, pfft…” Benji scoffed, but the effect was ruined by the fact that he was getting a bit teary around the edges. “Don’t be cheesy, that’s really a weakness of mine.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, no, it wasn’t five seconds ago, but apparently it is now.”

“I’ll be whatever you need, whatever you want.” Ethan looked so earnest, Benji thought it must be illegal.

“You don’t have to be anything, except what you already are,” he assured him, feeling a strange sense of mis-placed déjà vu. “That’s what people have been trying to tell me all this time, while I’ve been freaking out. That that’s the whole point of soulmates, they’re ready-made perfection.”

Ethan looked so soft. Almost silly. Though in the manliest way possible, of course. He looked like he was in love. “You know, I’ve heard that my whole life, but I didn’t believe it until I met you.”

“I am definitively not perfect.”

“Well, neither am I. We can be imperfect together.”

“Yeah, except you _are_ perfect, aren’t you?” Benji swung their connected hands nervously between them, “I know it’s true, I heard it on the radio. You are the pinnacle of humankind, or some such.”

“A very lonely pinnacle.”

“Oh my god,” Benji shook his head, “What am I going to do with you?”

“Stay with me.”

“Okay,” Benji agreed readily.

“I don’t need to convince you?”

“Nope. I’m on board.”

“That’s almost too bad,” Ethan’s mouth turned down in an exaggerated frown, “Because it was a long way to the moon and back, and I spent a lot of that time thinking up ways to convince you to be with me.”

“I really, really don’t need convincing,” Benji said in a rush, and then he leaned in to kiss Ethan because surely, it was time.

Ethan’s surprised “mmph!” was as sweet as his lips. Even sweeter, the feeling of his arms closing around Benji, clutching him close like he might disappear in a puff of smoke. Benji returned the embrace, hands sliding smooth up his back, thirsting for every detail of touch and texture and scent. He could feel all sorts of muscles through the thin fabric of Ethan’s shirt, and he wanted to memorize each and every one. He wanted to feel him, know him, inside and out. He wanted—

“That is _not_ minimal touching!” Doctor Burnham shouted through the comm, rather disrupting the moment.

Benji jolted back and wiped a guilty hand across his mouth.

“Sorry, June!” Ethan called back, with a sheepish wave, “My fault!”

“Don’t make me come in there and separate you two!” The doctor reprimanded, Luther’s laughter audible in the background. “Now, you’ve already gone quite past your ten minutes. Get out of there, Dunn, that’s an order.”

“Although I think I sort of outrank her,” Ethan whispered, “I’m not sure I could take her in fight. So, unfortunately…”

“I should probably go,” Benji agreed. “Just promise me you’ll still be here when I come back tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here if you’ll be here,” Ethan replied.

“Promise.” Benji didn’t move. It seemed a little impossible.

Because Ethan was very strong, in more ways than Benji could fathom, he was the first to release Benji. His hands slid reluctantly across his shoulders, down his arms, catching on his hands.

Before Benji could make a move to leave, Ethan reeled him in for another illicit kiss, making Dr. Burham throw her clipboard at the window, to no avail. There wasn’t a force on or off this Earth that could stop Benji kissing him back.

When Benji finally let go, when he finally said his last goodbye of the night and let the decon door slam shut between them, he was centered in a manner completely foreign to him. He knew who he was and who he could be, because he knew that he would never be truly alone again. Because he was finally getting a handle on the concept of “forever,” and what that could mean in human terms. Because no matter the door separating him and Ethan, no matter the distance between Ethan’s temporary home in the lab and Benji’s house with his grandmother and sister, no matter the days of glass and telephones before them, it was meaningless in the face of what they’d already endured.

They had survived being 238, 855 miles apart. Every mile from then on, they would travel together.

**Author's Note:**

> A couple pieces of the astronauts/Houston’s dialogue is straight from the news coverage, most notably Armstrong’s iconic phrase – I considered trying to come up with something else, but ultimately, felt it was only right to stick to the original for that moment. Other pieces are made up or altered, for example, the historical commentator’s emphasis on “Americans on the moon” was a bit tiresome (Cold War yada yada Beat the Commies yada yada) so this gender & nationality-diverse reimagining avoided that. 
> 
> Also...this AU was meant to be short and sweet, but 10k later....lol. 
> 
> If you have a moment, drop a comment and let me know what you thought! <3


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